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Topic: Honey Bee Counter (Read 6313 times)

I wanted to share my honey bee counter... It counts bees as they leave and enter the hive.

*****I'll be at the mini-maker Faire in Eugene, Oregon this Saturday (6/16) if anyone is in the area and wants to check it out...Also, our Portland Bee Keeper group is going to do a group build and sell a few with proceeds going to the Oregon State University Bee Lab... message me and I'll put you on the list....

Its so new I have no real data yet but I'll publish some information as it becomes available. I think I'll just use it from time to time to see the volume of bees entering and leaving. I'm a little concerned the 'gates' may keep the bees from cleaning out the hive... Any thoughts? cheers, -tom

Here is the website were you can review the design and build one yourself!

I'll have to wait to post until I get the administer to allow the links. -tom

Now if you could figure a way to make them put a drop of honey into a jar before they can pass you'd make a fortune!

Scott

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Keskin, IR might go through propolis, I don’t know. Visible light would be a problem for sure.

Hydronics, I like your design. Nice Job! I have had a bee counter on my “to do” list for about a year now and never got to it. I like your circuit design for differentiating bees that are exiting vs those that are returning. How many mm of space is there between your IR LEDs and the Phototransistors? It would really be cool to distinguish drones and the queen from the worker bees :)

How many mm of space is there between your IR LEDs and the Phototransistors? It would really be cool to distinguish drones and the queen from the worker bees :)

The sensors are right on top of each other.... the board is almost 18mm wide... but the sensors are only ~7mm apart center to center.... differentiating between bees would be fun to try to design... potentially you could use the same sensor with a few extra components to provide a distance profile of the bee... kind of like scanning the top of the bee (bee passing under the sensor) and then using the different profiles to differentiate the types of bees check out the digital IR sensor board on the sparkfun website by searching digital QRE1113.. I don't have permission to provide links... pretty cool idea...

If we could just let the hive know when the "ins" and "outs" don't match at the end of the day then they could send out small search parties. Or if more came in than went out they could a head count inside and see who wasn't supposed to be in there!